The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away (review)

When Somalia declared its independence from England and Italy in 1960, its national flag reflected the mission of unifying Somalia irredenta. The five-pointed white star on a sky-blue background represented the quintet of territories with ethnic Somalis that, in the newborn country's logic, should be part of the national fold: the former British north and Italian-dominated south, which comprised the modern state; the disputed Ogaden region of Ethiopia; Kenya's Northern Frontier District; and the French colony Djibouti.

These early nationalists likely did not fathom that a five-pointed star would be insufficient to include locations such as Columbus, Ohio, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. But it is to these cities and others that many Somali refugees have come since the 1990s to flee the famine and civil war for which their home country has become infamous. The Somali Diaspora, by essayist Doug Rutledge and Somali photographer Abdi Roble, documents a compelling sliver of Somali life by following one family-Abdisalam, wife Ijabo, and their children-from a Kenyan refugee camp to their first bewildering steps onto American terrain in 2006. Tales of the family's journey are complemented by chapters dealing with more mature Somali communities around the country, such as in Columbus and Minneapolis, the latter home to an estimated 50,000 Somalis.

Despite increasing numbers of Somalis in the United States, images of Somalis in the American imagination are limited to violent conflicts abroad-especially the braying mob dragging American servicemen's corpses through Mogadishu during the 1993 intervention. As law professor Patricia Williams has noted, media portrayals from that time often conflated Somaliness with criminality, and one NBC producer even referred to one of the country's then-warlords as "an educated jungle bunny" (202). The West's recent encounters with Somali piracy and Somalia's role as a fertile staging ground for terrorist activity have further fueled the representation of Somalis as threats to global stability. Such representations highlight the need for a more nuanced counter-understanding of this understudied population. While Somali refugees have been the subject of international research from the nongovernmental sector and some social scientists, the circle of Somali studies is small; few book-length studies about Somali resettlement have been published, and far fewer have taken the careful documentary-based approach of The Somali Diaspora.

To be a Somali means to be a person in search of a state, to paraphrase the title of David Laitin and Said Samatar's monograph on the apparent Somali paradox: a seemingly monoethnic nation, Somalia is in a cycle of perpetual conflict. With more than ninety-five percent of Somalis practicing Islam and speaking a common tongue, Somalia appeared a most novel rarity in polyglot, multi-faith Africa: a country whose very demographic should have prohibited devolution. Yet Somalia the state has been a relic since the government's collapse in the early 1990s. At that time, millions became internally displaced persons or asylum-seekers in neighboring countries, Scandinavia, and the Arab world.

While The Somali Diaspora presents a useful migration microhistory, its does not span the full geography of the diaspora, mostly neglecting Somali contact with Europe and the Middle East. While the authors make clear that there have been multiple waves of Somali migration to the United States, an entire "prehistory" of non-American Somali migration receives short shrift in this United States-centric account. Commerce led proto-Somalis across the Red Sea well before their American arrivals. According to Roxana Eleni Magriti, at least one claim suggests that Somalis were shipping water to the arid medieval city of Aden (in present-day Yemen) in the fourteenth century (50). By 1921, the peregrinations of Somalis sparked this remark by a colonial officer in British Somaliland: "You will find [the Somali] working as deck hand, fireman, or steward, on all the great liners trading to the East. I know of a Somali tobacconist in Cardiff [Wales], a Somali mechanic in New York, and a Somali trader in Bombay, the...